Weber Books

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by Darcy Pattison The term “book trailer” refers to video advertisements for books. Patterned at first after movie trailers, the form has been developing rapidly since it was first introduced in 2003 and starting taking off in 2005 with the advent of MySpace.com and Facebook.com. Early versions were created with powerpoint and were essentially a set of slides; creativity quickly upped the ante as many spent time and money to actually videotape and professionally edit trailers. Where are we today? Art Form The best book trailers today are true videos. Talking heads is out; simple retellings or a synopsis is cliche. Instead, trailers are designed to entice an audience, to tease, to leave the audience wanting the whole thing, the real thing. Actually, anything goes right now, as long as it leaves the audience wanting to buy the book. Here are some of the things I’ve seen done: the author reads the entire picture book in an endearing way, author reads a small section in front of an audience of kids, animated art, reality-videos shot at conferences of real-time reactions to a book, editor discussing the fabulous creativity of the author or artist, original music played by a fiddler, middle school kids talking to author, synopsis of story, book trailer that sounds like flap copy, or a creepy/romantic/scary/frustrated mood established by music and images. Each project will demand a different approach depending on the story, the expertise of the creator, the availability of funds for original music and videotaping, whether it’s done by the publisher or author, etc. Where? Already, you can see book trailers at libraries, on school buses (captive audience!), in classrooms, on YouTube.com, LibraryThing, Shelfari, Filedby, Amazon, publishers’ websites and on and on. Wherever you might find an audience for your book, you might find a book trailer. Experiment! Track results someway so you can track ROI, or return-on-investment. Essential or Optional for Plugging Your Book Online? Definitely optional. But fun. Exciting. Something that gives the author an illusion of control. In fact, I think this is one of the driving forces behind all the current hype about the author doing more marketing themselves. Publishers and booksellers are always searching for new ways to find an audience for their books; in today’s uncertain market, they’ve enlisted the author in the effort. This gives the author the illusion of control. It’s a mirage, UNLESS–ah, this is a big exception–you are testing different channels and tracking results and improving on those results. It’s not good enough any longer to simply “put up a website.” It’s wasted effort unless you know what you want to achieve with the site, with the trailer, with the free giveaways, etc. AND, you know how to track the results. You should have clear goals for each step, specific ways to track. In other words, unless you are committed to becoming a marketer, with a set of clear-cut trackable goals for each action you take online, then it’s wasted time. Just a hobby. And hobbies are not essential to the success of a career. Where Next? For the top books in each list, publishers are investing a lot in trailers.

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